Friday, December 23, 2011

FESTIVE FROLICKING

MERRY CHRISTMAS AND HAPPY NEW YEAR FROM ALL OF THE TEAM




The end of December is upon us and once again it has been a whirlwind of a year! Business for us increased but definitely a little slower than expected, like the mighty oak we are growing slow and growing strong.

2011 saw us...... extending the fleet, taking on new riders, snapping frames, taking brides to weddings and kids to proms, having our 4th birthday, transporting thousands of people at the Hay festival, racing in France, racing in England, filming secret projects, moving offices, doing charity work and continuing to provide our services to our customers. 

We transported thousands and thousands or items of freight, moved 15'000 people and saved over 1000 tonnes of Co2 entering the environment - not too shabby. 

Next year is going to be the big one though, we have plans to partner with a couple of businesses, extend our network, launch our inner city freight service officially to business to business clients and continue to grow in our public sector work. 

Whatever does happen we know that we couldn't do it without you guys, our customers and our followers and for your continued custom we are incredibly grateful.

I guess the last thing I have to say to you all is Happy Christmas and have a brilliant New Year, enjoy all the time off you might get as before we know it we'll be back to the grind! 

Until 2012!

Kind Regards

Will Vaughan
Rider and Director
Hereford Pedicabs and Cargo

Monday, December 5, 2011

Rural Media

 Some students from Rural Media came to do a little vid about us for a project..

Meeting Hereford Pedicabs from Rural Media on Vimeo.
Made by young filmmakers from The Rural Media Company’s Big Lottery funded project, Shoot Out.

Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Christmas lights switch on!

A week or so back we had the pleasure of escorting the Panto Dame in to town to switch on the local Christmas lights. It is a real pleasure to be involved with (groping aside)...

Cheeky Grope
Big Timers

The Big Switch On


Thursday, November 24, 2011

Off grid winter heating.

The depot we run most of the operations out of in Hereford is off grid and it has solar panels and a wind turbine to generate the power it needs. We used to be plugged in to a building next door, just in case we needed power but more of less we were ok, apart from the winter. 


You see... it is easy enough to generate power for lights, computers, charging batteries and that sort of stuff but the real killer is heating. For example our led lighting system uses 10w of power and we can run that from our battery reserve for 265 hours. Yep, 11 days straight, but we easy generate more than enough power to run them. In contrast we could run a 3kw heater for only 1 hour from our reserves. So heating is the tricky thing and if last year is anything to go by we need to be prepared.


So we've been doing some research and we've found some heaters which are used on ships. They combust diesel (like a tiny engine) and this makes heat, they then have a little 12v fan which pulls air around the engine (which heats the air) and blows it out through a tube. We think we can run one of these on biodiesel so we bought one and installed it a few weeks ago. It draws a small current to run the thermostat, fuel pump and fan so we needed to install another battery to double our capacity.
Then cut a few holes in the floor (we routed the cables under the floor)
Then install the heater, we bought in our expert Tone to help with this
Once the heater went in we then drilled a hole through the wall and stuck the fuel tanks in
So more or less we were done, we tested the whole setup away from the site (at our rural testing facility) so we knew things would probably be ok. We stuck a thermostat on the wall on the opposite side of the heater and then plonked a seat over the setup to hide it away. So now the only thing you really know about the heater is this nozzle...
Which is attached to this tube..
Which attaches to the heater

So all in all it is a very simple setup and it has been really brilliant so far. It uses about 1w of battery power to run and if running at full power (2.8kw) it uses 200ml of fuel an hour. To keep a room at a comfortable temperature (17-21 ish) it is barely on and of course the blown heat circulates really well. 

Its been pretty awesome getting it all up to speed and we're confident the workers will be super toasty over winter!



Friday, November 4, 2011

Safety never takes a day off..

We're running some great advertising on our inner city recycling bikes at the moment. Our local council subcontracts much of its maintenance contract to a company called AMEY Wye Valley who are part of huge company AMEY
We bumped into a representative from AMEY at a local event 'h:Energy'. They got a chance to see our recycling bike and thought it would be a great idea to place some info regarding the safety of their road workers on it, where the other traffic would see it.
The adverts highlight how important it is to be aware of road workers at this time of the year, with fading light and work being done on the roads. It is a great idea to have the posters up on our bikes and hopefully together we'll be able to get the message out there.

Thursday, November 3, 2011

Doubling the capacity

So it's been a pretty gloomy few weeks and we've not been getting much sun.

Because we generate our own power this causes us a bit of a problem. When it has been sunny we've filled our reserve batteries right up but when there has been no sun or wind we've been pretty close to using those reserves up. Typically we've got three days of power to play with before we are without power. Usually that's fine but we are using more now than we have previously, lots of things to charge and run.

So after another bleak week... we decided to double our capacity of batts. A few fuses and connections and everything is in place. We just need some sun now to charge it up..

Thursday, October 13, 2011

Secret filming, secret project...

We are doing some delivery work for an exciting new project which is launching in Hereford soon... It is even going to have TV adverts, which we'll be in... for about 2 seconds... We did some secret filming a few weeks back. Sshhhhhhhhhhh
We could tell you, but we would have to kill you.

Big Boys Toys

We got to play with a 40 tonne crane last week. There is a building being knocked down next to one of our storage depots...
.
So we picked them up..
Swung them around...
And plonked them down... All before breakfast.

Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Ahead of the curve

Really interesting article in the Guardian today - click here All about local authority not making enough effort to collect trade waste for recycling. The lead on effects of this being that what is left that businesses sorts from their own streams is often of such a small amount it isn't valuable to third party collection companies OR it goes home with employees and goes into their household stream. In turn this is driving the price of recyclable materials down. Also the businesses are not being credited for the Co2 saving they are potentially making as their is no formal way of tracking it. The fascinating thing for us is that we have been providing a solution which is cost effective for 4 years. We are cheaper than the cost to send to landfill with the Council and we return the yearly Co2 savings to the customers so they can tell their customers. We service about 400 businesses and collect all the waste with emission free vehicles. We average a saving of about 1000 tonnes of Co2 per year collectively from all our customers.
In fact we can only really make a profit because our overheads are so low, but this makes us really competitive and means we are very busy.

Friday, September 23, 2011

Pedicab riders wanted - spread the word

So we are a couple of riders short at the moment and they are going to be gone for a pretty long time. We're on the hunt for some more. So if you want to get fit, earn some good cash, have a good laugh and be part of fun, green, honest and rapidly growing company get in touch with us. There's loads of good benefits, at least one free curry a year and a fancy dress party.. You need to be over 21 and have a car licence and nothing nasty that'll show up on a CRB check. Send a c.v or a fleshed out email to info@herefordpedicabs.com and we'll send you some more information. We look forward to hearing from you!

Monday, September 12, 2011

Breast Cancer Haven

So young Tomo and I did a few hours charity work on the bikes this week for Hereford Haven who are a great organisation. The Haven provides, completely free of charge, a wide range of therapies which help people to deal with the physical and emotional side effects of breast cancer.
A couple of local shops - Hat Trick and Cherry Savage opened up a little later than usual and donated a percentage of their profit to the Hereford Haven . We ran shuttles between the two shops to make sure the shoppers made the most of their time! It was a great idea for an event an hopefully we'll do some more with the those guys in the future.

Wednesday, August 24, 2011

Holiday, weddings and races

Been ages since I last blogged to you guys and you are about to find out why! We have been super flat out and had lots of things happening, plenty of changes and also I've been away on holiday...

So a few weeks back I departed for France with good friend of the company Mr Mad Dog, the plan was to head over to the Alps to race in the Megavalanche and on the way there we'd head to Bourg San Maurice to stay with the guys at coolbus . It was an amazing trip and me and the Mad Dog met up with loads of people. Like many trips like this it contained the main ingredients...

Cheese

Mountains.

and Racing.


We all did as well as we wanted to, qualifying to race, racing and just generally having a blast out there.

I had no worry whilst out in France as Tom and Matt had the company in good hands, they immediately gave it a rebrand and issued themselves the employee of the month award It was great to know the company was in good hands in my absence..

On a more serious note as I returned it was time for Matt to move on to greater things, he's gone to work on a farm for the hop season and should be back to work on some contracts we've got in the pipeline, but just for now... Here's to Matt and all that sail in him!

Also on my return I managed (via the twittersphere) to hear about a GLC gig in Monmouth. My bro was about so we headed over and caught it, it was epic - nice one boys.

Summer has been brilliant for us and we've done tonnes of weddings. Tom and Mike have been rocking the proms too. But most important has been the wedding of Elle Botwright who is the sister of Ben Botwright who helped us many years ago to establish a depot with local company Bulmers. They have since been bought out but Ben continues to do fine work and is a great friend of ours.

His sisters wedding was brilliant and we were proud to help out.

The bikes were dressed up nicely. But definitely not dressed as nicely as the whole Botwright clan. What a bunch of beauties!

So the summer has been busy and other than a broken bell and a snapped axle everything has been running smoothly, so smoothly that I managed to escape to another race last weekend The Brompton World Championships... last year a finely tuned team I was in got 10th position and this year I was out for blood... everyone in the team gave everything and we pulled our times up from last year massively, all of us placing well. Turns out it all counted because we ploughed in a steady 9th position! Brilliant. If you check this video out you'll see me at 2:54 making a rapid overtake on the right..

Victory was ours!


So in essence that's been the last few weeks and sorry for not being in touch, as you can see we've been super busy. More blogs to come!



Thursday, June 23, 2011

Mazuma

So for a while we've been doing our own accounts and book keeping and payroll and to be honest it turns out it is a much bigger job then we ever gave it credit for, it's the one thing everyone hates doing and is something which is really really important.

So last month we had a chat with Mazuma who provide a really great service. We stick everything in an envelope each month and they do the rest. That's it, no catch, no massive fees just a really great innovative approach to business. If we want to speak to them we can, if we want to email we can, if we want to text them.. yep you guessed it we can.

So this week we've been getting all the stuff together from last year and putting it in envelopes... and.. yesterday was the big day when we finally posted it.....and that appears to be it, no more hassle, no more worry, no big fees. It'll be less to do it like this than it will with us doing all our own stuff and approaching an accountant each year and it's so easy. Stick the stuff in the envelope and post it, each month. Bingo. They send a report back, whammy, accounts sorted.

It's ace when you find something like that.

Also, it helped that the guy I was in touch with about maybe starting with Mazuma happened to be into riding MTBs , that swung the deal for us, they must be a decent bunch!

Little Hay round up.

So I guess it is about time if not way to late for us to give you a round up on how the Hay festival went for us.

It was a pretty amazing week for everyone involved, we managed to run both bikes from 10am-10pm for pretty much the entire festival. We transported 1000’s of customers up and down the 1/2 mile straight to Hay and back. Which as you can see took its toll on young Ben

We arrived on the morning of our first shift and were quickly ushered to our temporary digs in Fred’s store tent.

Which provided us with some grand facilities, I’m pictured here with our chill out area and luxury relaxing seating provisions…

Joking aside it was brilliant to get the chance to get out of the weather and refuel when we needed it and we are very grateful for the team at Hay for putting up with our antics and providing us with a safe place to leave our belongings.

By the end of a long shift the site of the tent bought an all over feeling of relief to the body and it was also a great time for all of us to see each other.

Ben and Joe were never short of supplies from the catering tent.

Also having a quiet area gave us plenty of time to prep bikes and share stories.


Most of the stories were about the incredible wind up and down the main straight to Hay, each day it blew a different direction and every day it was punishing. But the tales of extraordinary feats came in day after day, of Duggan’s huge non stop mileage counts, of whopping tips from Mike, or failing knees from Ben, or Australian banter from Woody, of mid shift ‘bonk’ from Joe and who’s had which celebrity and what they tipped from just about everyone.



Hay festival was very busy and a great place for people to get to meet the authors and speakers they have followed for many years. Here John Snow vanishes into the busy crowd.

Between us over the week we got to know lots of the top names. We bumped into Jason Bradbury and rushed a suitcase of books from his hotel to a signing, entertained Matt Horne, hauled Brian Moore up the hill into town, had banter and love notes from Arthur Smith, narrowly missed the Arch Bishop of Canterbury and talked about Andy Murray with Germaine Greer. So for us it was an interesting time and a pleasure to be at the festival. We even got to slip into a Cerys Matthews gig.


The unsung heroes Matt and Tom need to be credited, they worked hard in Hereford keeping everything in order and running the business, without them we wouldn’t have been able to work at Hay.

So in summary it was great and we hope to do it again, we estimate we moved the same amount of people by the end of the week that 100 of the regular shuttle buses would have and that everyone of our customers had a great time.

See you there next year!

Friday, June 10, 2011

Duggan makes the Telegraph


One of our fine new riders stonked into the online write up of the Hay festival..
Looking strong Duggan